


Jump Into the Fire

by fluorescentgrey



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Arizona - Freeform, Blood and Injury, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Friendship, M/M, Making Out, Recreational Drug Use, Rock Climbing, The Mortifying Ordeal of Being Known, Totally Fed Up Grad Students AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:55:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,449
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23494186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: The Best Kiss Ever, its subsequents and its discontents.
Relationships: Babe Heffron/Eugene Roe, Joseph Liebgott/David Kenyon Webster
Comments: 33
Kudos: 74





	Jump Into the Fire

**Author's Note:**

> this story is based on the fictional versions of the characters from the TV series.

i. 

The best kiss ever happened on a Tuesday night. Nixon had gone to visit an old girlfriend’s place up near Flagstaff on spring break and had come back with a bushel of highest quality skunk in a monogrammed LL Bean duffel bag. Festivities were planned for Buck and Bill’s place off-campus, playlist duties were given to Babe, foodstuffs to Malarkey. The anticipation, and the looming specter of midterms, meant that nobody was interested in waiting until the weekend. 

Only select among them could muster some tenderness of heart for their studies, even now, what felt like eighty thousand years in. By this point, Webster wondered sometimes if he had not been in school, somehow, longer than he had been alive. He had been in the library grading undergrads’ English 101 papers until he lost track of time and so when he showed up the entire ranch looked like a seventies sex club inside — soft light, smoke — but for the dust tracked in onto the tiles and the wall-to-wall beige carpeting. (He thought he remembered that when Buck and Bill had started renting this place the carpet had not been beige, though he struggled to remember what color it had been.) Half the attendees were staring mystifiedly into a lava lamp, swallowed into the dispersed brown leather furniture, looking like victims of the rapture. 

Outside, Malarkey was explaining to assorted girlfriends and visitors and peripheral acquaintances how to best utilize the beehive pizza oven he had constructed from scratch in the back of the yard. A freight train was stopped on the tracks behind the place, and Randleman was trying to do chin-ups on Babe’s hangboard in attempt to impress a disinterested-looking girl. Nixon, pinching a monumental blunt, was on the back porch, with Gene, who was teetotal, talking politics, a subject so fraught that Gene jumped to his feet at the sight of Webster, even though they didn’t talk much. “Hey, listen. I'll be right back, Lew. Web, you gotta try this.” 

They went back inside. It must have been a really bad political conversation for Gene to risk the contact high. Those who weren’t staring at the lava lamp were harshly critiquing Babe’s meticulously assembled playlist — currently spinning Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire” — or shoveling chips and salsa into their mouths. “Did you make your grandma’s gumbo again,” Webster asked Gene as they winnowed their way through the crowd to the kitchen. 

“No, deviled eggs. They’re pretty good — had to get away from Nix. We were trying to talk about Medicare for All, and you know when he gets on his whole _capitalism is the only economic system known to function_ thing.”

Webster winced. “Ask him to define _function_.”

“I have! Have you? That’s a whole other ballgame…” 

Liebgott and Luz were in the kitchen, tossing scraps to Bill and Babe’s dogs. They both had a way of holding beers, like they’d come out of the womb doing it. “Web,” said Luz, “you’re late.”

Webster shrugged. “Grading the kids’ _Beowulf_ papers.”

Liebgott’s face twisted into its judgiest comportment. He loved to make fun of the lame and nerdy shit other people had to deal with, probably defensively, being as he was in the geology department and likely up to his knees in lame and nerdy shit on a daily basis. Maybe it all boiled down to the scintillating rivalry shared by humanities scholars and hard scientists since time immemorial. But Gene was a med student and he wasn’t an asshole. Webster looked around for him but he had already pinched a deviled egg and disappeared in search of fresh air. 

“Should’ve known you guys would smoke it all,” Webster said to Liebgott and Luz, to avoid going into all this. 

“We didn’t.” Liebgott reached into the ashtray on the counter beside him and produced an expertly rolled joint about the thickness of a pencil. Webster reached for it, thinking of Michelangelo’s _The Creation of Adam_. 

\--

Next thing he knew, the couch was consuming him alive. There was a warm blanket weighing approximately equivalent to a thousand suns which lay very gently over him like a thundercloud. Babe’s playlist was spinning something at the exact frequency of raw honey. Beside him Liebgott appeared to have been impacted similarly. His face, which almost always looked like he had recently eaten something bitter, unless he was watching a movie or asleep, when it looked like he had recently eaten something just mildly tart, was slack and soft. Instead of staring at the lava lamp he was watching the bubbles in his beer bottle effervesce. There was a hole in his jeans inside the left knee. After a moment he closed his eyes and put the crown of his head back against the wall. The sound of his lips unsticking might not have been audible over the music unless you were really listening carefully. 

The light — Phoenix had this light. If you had grown up your whole life in New England this light was like an eldritch horror at first. It could not exactly be named or quantified. The sunset lasted years. Time melted over the desert and seeped into the earth and reformed itself again in the morning, like rewinding a VHS tape in order to return it to the library. The last of this light, like the final flash, which could have been called orange-pink, like the inside of a popsicle melting against the sidewalk, appeared in the window and shifted through the dark, still room. It was moving so sublimely that only Webster could see it. It filtered through the filthy window, through the smoke and the laughter and the stoned haze, and illuminated Liebgott’s face craggily. His neck — he had missed a spot shaving and cut another spot just under his Adam’s apple — caught a strike of fluorescence. 

“Lieb,” Webster said. His own voice echoing in the cavern of his skull. Echoing basically out of another place and time such that at first he did not quite realize it was himself that had said it. 

Liebgott cracked an eyelid. In the purplish light the redness in the white of his eye seemed a deep blue. He pressed his tongue against his canine tooth, as though he were going to let the characteristic smirk stretch across his face but had thought better of it at the last minute. It was immediately clear that he understood something that Webster realized later he had been trying to say, even if he himself wasn’t exactly sure what it was. The entire world sharpened like a pencil into this narrow point. The space between them which was shrinking. There was a kernel — an atom — of raw, pure truth at the center of this space and they each reached for it, towards each other. And the sun sank its last drop of light into the molten core of the world. 

Thence the best kiss ever. 

\--

Webster might have slept all day in Buck’s canoe in the backyard, mosquitos be damned — with Bill’s mom’s knit afghan and a couch pillow under his head, it was a hell of a lot more comfortable than his carrell in the library, at least — except that Babe came out around eight and poured a glass of cold water over his head. 

He had been having a nice dream. For a few moments he flailed in desperate, hungover confusion. “What the fuck was that for!” 

Babe had crouched beside the canoe, wearing his Talking Heads shirt and an expression of… consternation might have been putting it nicely. His scabby knees were pale at the hems of his cutoff jeans. “I know you can be a real fucking playboy douchebag,” he said. “I try not to slut-shame you, but you make it hard!” 

“Wait — Babe, what?” 

“Listen, we’ve all seen you with a different undergrad chick every week, it’s none of my goddamn business, okay? But — ” 

Webster put a finger up and bent away from Babe to puke, thankfully sparing the canoe from the worst of it. He could hardly get moisture into his mouth to spit out the taste, and eventually Babe started patting his back rather more roughly than was necessary. 

“Listen, I just can’t have you doing it to my friend, okay? Are you even — I dunno. I didn’t — what the fuck. It’s just not cool, man.” 

Webster still had no idea what Babe was talking about for another blissful two seconds, until he turned Babe’s way quizzically and at the sight of his rare but terrifying heads-will-roll expression somehow instantly remembered the issue at hand, which was the best kiss ever, which had been not even twelve hours ago, with none other than — god damn it — Joe Liebgott. “Oh man,” Webster managed. He was not famously articulate under pressure. “Oh, fuck.” 

He had literally bitten Liebgott’s lip. Just a nip, but it counted. Liebgott’s hand had been on his neck, maybe a little too tightly to be really comfortable, now that he was thinking about it. He felt that now he could understand every cliched romance novel trope ever used about kisses, or otherwise the Echo and the Bunnymen song “Lips Like Sugar,” except that Liebgott had tasted like his extremely hoppy IPA, and pot, and something burned, and blood. A shiver went through him, and then another heave, and he coughed a couple tablespoons of violent acid. 

“That bad, huh,” said Babe coldly. 

Webster shook his head. He didn’t want to further provoke Babe’s ire by telling him it had been the best kiss ever. 

“You’re a grown man and I don’t like telling you what you can and can’t do,” Babe went on. “But you can’t do this again. Please. For the love of god. I had to put the group chat on mute.” 

Webster silently thanked all the gods and goddesses that he was not part of this fabled group chat, which encompassed most of their friends but not all, under the guise of a rugby team that never played anymore. Occasionally he was jealous, and he felt doomed to permanent outsider status, but usually he was glad that he didn’t have to put up with a constant stream of niche memes, science bullshit, rock climbing jargon, pizza oven schematics, and bitching. 

“How did you get delegated to chew me out,” Webster asked. 

“Nobody else wanted to.” Babe shrugged. “They’re all emotionally illiterate.” 

“And they’re all straight.” 

That surprised a laugh out of him. “You keep telling yourself that.” 

Webster knew he needed an upper hand, desperately, if he didn't want to come out of this figuratively (literally was already lost) looking like a wet poodle. “What about you and Gene.” 

Babe’s ruddy eyebrow arched toward his hairline. But he gave himself away quickly with the tight clasp of his hands between his knees and the way he looked regretfully down at them. “He says he’s too busy for a relationship,” said Babe. “I mean, he just started his residency at St. Luke’s.” 

“Hasn’t stopped you.” 

“Yeah, well.” Babe sighed. “ _Busy_ is relative.” 

“So…?”

“So what?” 

“So why are you so… why does it matter? You can sleep with our friend but — ” 

A comical array of affronted emotions played across Babe’s face. “This is completely different!” he shouted. “It’s not even comparable!” 

“What? How!” 

“I am not taking advantage of Gene’s undying passionate love for me to like, allergy-test my confusion about my sexuality!” 

He had said this altogether too loud for hungover eight AM on a Wednesday in a quiet residential neighborhood. Some birds flew off in a frazzled party from the overflowing gutters. 

“Wait,” said Webster, “what?” 

“Lieb is totally obsessed with you,” Babe enunciated, like he was explaining basic math concepts to a five year old. “Come on. Duh! Last time we went out to Queen Creek, he named a boulder problem _Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary_.” 

Webster’s head hurt. He had seen this on Babe’s Instagram, because Liebgott didn’t have one. Babe was a half decent photographer and the image was graceful with forms and colors: a wedge of bluebird sky, and the ashy, pockmarked volcanic stone, and the dancerly bend of Liebgott’s back against his white t-shirt as he pulled himself up into the crux move. Webster didn’t even remember if he had double-tapped on it. He had never known anybody who rock climbed on actual rocks before moving to Tempe, and now it was like they were all around him at all times in clever disguises. He groaned. “I thought that was, um, in reference to the dictionary.” 

Babe flicked Webster’s temple, hard, and looked up desperately into the white and cloudful sky, asking it, “How can one person be so clueless?” 

\--

On the tram back to the college and the library and class, once the hangover had dissipated enough that he could look at his phone without wanting to vomit up a lung, Webster pulled up Babe’s Instagram and scrolled to the picture from Queen Creek. 

_Lieb finally sent this FA (we think) after three hours… he insists on calling it Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (V6)_

He had supplemented the caption with the upside-down smiley face emoji and the climber emoji. Bill had commented with a string of _shh_ emojis. 

If this was 2007 and he had had a flip phone, Webster would have clapped it shut vengefully. He did put his phone in his pocket and not look at it for possibly a world record of six minutes. 

How was it possible that he could have missed something that was beginning to seem extremely obvious? Certainly it had been obvious to everybody but Webster. He reflected on further ramifications with a dawning horror and the kind of deep hungover regret he had hardly experienced since his graduation from Harvard: He, in turn, must have been noticing Liebgott all this time. How else would he have remembered a single photograph in which his face was not even visible, posted to Babe’s Instagram like six months ago? 

He put his burning forehead against the rattling tram window and called some things to memory. The soft mouth which folded against his and the long nose pressed against his cheek. The open hand against his throat. He fell asleep and woke up near the Phoenix airport, hopelessly late for class, embarrassingly hard in his clammy jeans, and waited another hour for the tram car to go around again back toward campus, seething with humiliated rage. 

\--

Luz came to Webster’s office hours and pretended to look at some of his first edition Zane Grey westerns and asked some halfassed questions about Webster’s dissertation and didn’t bother listening to the answers, and finally, just when Webster was about to ask him to just come out with it, he arranged himself in the spare chair and, staring at the ceiling, asked thoughtfully, “Why didn’t you tell us you were gay?”

“Because I’m not gay.”

Luz was unbothered. He blinked. “Why didn’t you tell us you were bi?”

“I’m not — listen, I was really fucked up — ”

“Web, I’ve made out with my fair share of our friends while drunk or high and I still think of myself as a Kinsey 1, or I guess maybe a 2 sometimes, but that was a passionate lip lock. I mean, that was like a movie kiss.” 

Webster shrugged, hating every second of this. “I don’t know what to tell you, man. It didn’t, I don’t know, mean anything, really.”

“It sure as hell didn’t look like it didn’t mean anything! Didn’t you bite him?”

His face was burning. “It’s kind of a reflex. But wait, you were watching that closely?”

“Yeah, it replaced the lava lamp as the most interesting thing in the room.” Luz yawned. “Half of the group chat wants your head on a pike, and the other half is trying to get up the balls to ask you for sex tips.” 

If this whole debacle forced him to become a walking Cosmo magazine, he was going to have to transfer to Hawaii or Alaska. Webster buried his head in his hands.

“Did you talk to Lieb yet?”

“I kind of never want to see his face again,” Webster lied.

“Well, you’re shit out of luck on that front.”

“I am? What if I just… moved into my office and never went out or did anything or saw anyone ever again?”

“You’d shrivel up and die,” Luz reminded him in all seriousness. “You can’t survive grad school without non-academic human contact. It’s basically a proven fact.”

“Luz,” Webster moaned, “I’m fucked.”

“We’ve all done stupid things, Web.”

“This stupid?”

“No, not really, or I mean, maybe this stupid in a different way.”

Webster put his head down on his deck. His notebook pages were quite cool in the heat of the afternoon. “That’s encouraging,” he said. 

\--

Nervously, stalking up the driveway like a tetchy deer, Webster went by Buck and Bill’s house on Friday after class only to find Liebgott outside, alone with beer in hand, sitting on the overturned canoe. He was watching the freight trains beyond the yard move against the last golden strains of the day before sunset. There was a split second where Webster thought he might leave without being seen. Then the gate to the backyard slammed behind him and from inside the house the dogs started yowling. The dogs, at least, could reliably be counted upon to appreciate the sight of Webster. The same could not be said for Liebgott, who looked like he had swallowed something that was too hot. 

It was up to someone to be the better man here. “Happy Friday, Lieb,” said Webster. 

“Yeah, yeah.” 

He stood up and made defiant, soul-shredding eye contact. He was not as beautiful as he had looked under the influence of possibly the most potent weed on the planet, but Webster doubted he himself was either, and, regardless, his entire mind cleared of anything that he had theoretically planned to say when he had been lying awake thinking about hypothetical ways in which this scenario might play out. What are you supposed to say to someone with whom you have shared the best kiss ever and literally nothing else except a hair-trigger temper and a knuckle-length fuse? It’s worse when you have it on good authority that this person has a kind of clueless crush on you. 

“Do you, um.” Webster cringed. “You going to Idaho again this summer?” 

“Web, it’s February.” 

“Is it, I mean, does time really have any meaning in Phoenix…?” 

Liebgott looked into the house with an expression near desperation. Whatever he saw in there must not have been much better, because he quickly looked back across the yard toward the shifting trains. Then he turned back to Webster. The smirk was coloring his face into an expression Webster thought he knew how to deal with. “Come on,” he said. 

“Where are we going?” 

Liebgott gave him a look that suggested this was a stupid question. They went to the edge of the yard and hopped over the fence between the housing development and the train tracks. There was a freight train trundling slowly along the middle track, hauling shipping containers. 

“Wait,” Webster said, just at the moment that Liebgott started running. He started running too, but he was still yelling. “Wait, what the fuck?” 

Liebgott pointed to a ladder at the end of one of the cars. “Get on!” 

“No fucking way!” 

He thought he meant it, but if he did, why was he still running? 

Liebgott grabbed the ladder at the neighboring end of the next car, first with an overhand palm, then the other underhand, lifting himself up with his climbing grace until he could get his feet on the rungs. He made it look so easy that Webster had to follow to spite him. It was like being pulled along by a moving car for a split second in which he was not afraid of death, or anything, not even Liebgott, not even whatever this meant, and then his feet were off the ground, and he was still alive. Electrified — every gulp of oxygen tasted like drugs — but alive. 

Liebgott had hopped across the gap between the cars and settled himself in the well against the shipping containers. Webster tried to pretend he wasn’t gasping for breath, more from the adrenaline than the exertion. He climbed into the well next to Liebgott and put his head back against the vibrating metal. For the first time in years, since undergrad, really, he wanted a cigarette — a real cigarette. He turned to Liebgott, thinking he might ask for one, but instead found himself kind of psychedelically transfixed by Liebgott’s hair in the wind, and the freckles on his sunburnt neck, the kind of unfamiliar delight, almost a childishness, about his face. The train pulled around the curve behind the hospital, jostling them against each other in the well. The end of the light was diffuse against the low buildings. 

Freedom: he could not remember the last time he had felt freedom like this. The wild white void of extreme possibility. Perhaps the last time he had felt it was on Tuesday during the best kiss ever. He felt like laughing or otherwise like singing opera. 

“How do you even — how do you know how to do this?” 

Liebgott turned to him with a blindsiding smile of uncharacteristic brightness and joy. “I was in undergrad at Evergreen State College,” he said. 

Webster’s jaw dropped. “No fucking way.” 

“Yeah, you just hop on for the weekend, see where you go. We went to L.A. once. Mostly to Northern California and Oregon.” 

“Wait, but you went to Evergreen?” 

“Yeah, you got a problem?” 

“Whoa, jeez. I mean… I never would have thought of you as, like, an Olympia crust punk.” 

“Well, I didn’t get into Deep Springs, and I wouldn’t have made it five minutes at a normal college, and I did get a nice financial aid package, but I was not and have never been a crust punk.”

Webster had no choice but to take him at his word. After all, he was the only one of them who categorically refused to pick up an acoustic guitar when one was available in a campfire setting. 

They went through the intersection on University Drive at the edge of downtown Tempe. Liebgott waved at a pickup truck stopped behind the blinking gate. 

“Do you do this a lot anymore?” 

“Hmm. Sometimes.” 

“By yourself?” 

“Sure.” 

He had a lot more questions. Like, chiefly, _why?_ But then the train went over the town lake. The light was pink and fell all over the water and reflected in the windows of the unfinished high-rises like a satin curtain. They were quiet together in the loveliness of its wake. 

“We might have to bail,” Liebgott said once they had crossed. “If it starts to stop at the fucking… Amazon fulfillment bullshit.” 

“Bail?” 

“Yeah, like, jump off. 

Something in the back of his brain gleefully flipped the fear switch. “Jump — !” 

“It’ll be going slower than this. You climb down the ladder and kind of run with it. Leaning away from it. You have anything with straps on you?” 

Webster patted himself down. “No.” 

“Okay. Good. Tuck in your shirt. Don’t do anything unless I say.” 

He was attentive as Bill and Babe’s dogs at the glass storm door out onto the patio when they were barbecuing, vigilant for the sound and the feeling of the brakes or something mystical like the smell of cops on the breeze. He had turned away from Webster, watching south toward the roaring freeway, and Webster briefly stared at the torque of his back and shoulders under his white shirt before he realized what he was doing and looked away, embarrassed, breeze and dust stinging his eyes. 

Living in Tempe, they rarely ventured into Phoenix, because it was an awful lot like Tempe, except worse. The train pulled under the freeway and into an industrial lot, where it started to pick up speed. “Okay,” said Liebgott, settling back against the shipping containers, “we’re good.” 

"Where are we going?" 

“Dunno. Probably Flagstaff. I think this is the line that goes along Route 60, and then it cuts up north outside of Wickenberg.” 

“Flagstaff?” 

“Yeah. Is that a problem?” 

“Lieb, I have like… thirty thousand undergraduate papers to grade before Monday.” 

“You know as well as I do that if we weren’t on this goddamn train you’d be back at Bill and Buck’s getting fucked up on more of Nixon’s weed.” 

Webster hated that this was true. He also hated that Liebgott had evoked the specter of Nixon’s weed and, as such, any and all proceedings evolving from the smoking thereof. At least, he thought he hated it, because something was sinking inside his chest, at the same time that something else was being lifted up. 

“Listen,” Webster said, though this was worse than pulling off a bandaid — it was probably like pulling an entire wax strip of hair off your chest, not that he had ever tried that, “I’m sorry.” 

Liebgott perked up, like a scavenging animal who has smelt carrion on the breeze. “Sorry for what?” 

“You know.” 

“I don’t know,” he said, though he did know. He showed that predatory canine tooth. He was really like a hyena or something. 

“Kissing you.” 

Liebgott smiled twitchily but something else reflected in his eyes, so he looked away across the city to the south, toward the airport and the Salt River. Webster felt a flash of something akin to rage or tenderness. How could one person be so fucking impossible? “Why are you sorry for kissing me?” Liebgott asked. 

“Well, I should maybe have, um, asked…” 

“I would have said, just not in front of all our friends, so they don’t bust our balls for all eternity.” 

“Yeah. Me too. Well, I should have given you the chance to say that, at least, so I’m sorry.” 

Liebgott took a steadying kind of breath. “It was some kiss,” he said. 

“Yeah. It was.” 

“You bit — ” 

“Yeah. Sorry about that too.” 

Their eyes met. Liebgott touched his own lower lip with his first two fingers, as though there were a little wound there, or as though it were still hot. A chill passed up Webster’s spine, as palpable as if someone had touched him with a cold hand. 

Somebody had to pass a hand through the chalky sketch of this on the blackboard of reality. It was Liebgott, who said, “You must get all these fancy tricks from cycling through all the girls in the freshman class.” 

“I don’t — why does everybody think I do that! I dated _one_ sophomore one time. And _she_ dumped _me_!” 

Liebgott shrugged. “Embrace your personal legend.” 

“Not that one, god! It’s gross. And offensive! It’s morally and ethically — ”

Liebgott waved a hand across his face. “Yeah, yeah.” 

“I’m serious.” 

“Only you would hate being thought of as a pussy magnet.” 

“Probably about as much as you hate the idea of being thought of as an Olympia crust punk.” 

“For the last fucking time, I was not and have never been and will never be a crust punk and hardly any of our friends even know that I ever lived in Olympia, and you bring a new blonde over the the house every week!” 

“I do not,” Webster grumbled; though he did sometimes bring girlfriends, it was certainly not every week, and they were only sometimes blonde, and they were almost invariably fellow grad students. Half the time he wasn’t even sleeping with them! “I didn’t know you were watching so closely.” 

“I — ” Liebgott looked down into the car’s wheel wells. Either it was the last light or the tips of his ears were pink. “Babe said he — well.” 

“He gave me a stern talking to.” 

“He really has no idea what he’s talking about,” Liebgott said. “I just want you to know that.” 

“Okay.” 

“Okay?” 

“Yeah! Fine, whatever.” 

“Because I think he told you — ”

“He said you were obsessed with me.” 

The furious expression — drawn, wide-eyed — came shockingly over Liebgott’s face, like a mask out of a Goya painting. Webster had only seen it before immediately proceeding barfights. “I’m gonna kill him,” Liebgott announced. 

“I mean — ”

“I am not — am _not_.” 

“It’s okay if you are.” 

This surprised him. His eyes, very dark in the dusk light, grew about two more sizes. “You might want to be careful how you talk to me,” he said tightly, “as we are on a train going sixty miles an hour and you’ve never done this before.” 

“I’m being about as careful as I know how to be.” Webster swallowed. He did not doubt he might imminently get bucked off like an unlucky rodeo rider. “It’s okay — because I think I like — ” 

“Shut the fuck up.” 

Webster put his hands up. “Okay, okay. Jesus.” 

He let Liebgott do whatever internal anger management processes he probably had to do several thousand times a day to keep from exploding, and looked out over the endless sprawl of the Valley of the Sun. When the demon god of American capitalism had applied a series of cities to this inhospitable desert where no person in their right mind should live, it must have squeezed a viscous ooze made of warehouses and piss-yellow fluorescent lighting out of a tube and into a gooey pile in the dust, then spread it flattish with a palette knife, as thin and as far as it could go until it faded into nothing. Seeing it like this, flashing by quick as blinking, the great absurdity of its very existence was tantamount only to the clarity of its incredible impermanence. After all, people had lived in this valley since two hundred years before Christ. It was in our nature to carve evidence of our existence into the unforgiving and ever-erasing world, in futile attempt to live longer than our bodies, that much went without saying. It was just a shame that it had to be so ugly. 

“God,” said Liebgott. “You’re thinking American Literature Ph.D. things, aren’t you.” 

“Oh my god.” 

“You are!” His smile was a bright knife. Something inside Webster’s chest tugged tight and twanged. 

“I was just — ” 

“I don’t actually want to know.” 

“Do you ever think about time?” said Webster, spitefully ignoring him. 

Liebgott’s eyebrow cocked. “I’m a geologist.” 

“I don’t mean like that.” 

“There’s another way to think about it?” He shrugged. “Geologic time makes everything else like a blink. Our entire lifetime is… like a mosquito or something.” 

“You find that perspective comforting?” 

He blinked. “No. It’s not about — ”

“Isn’t it?” 

Liebgott studied him. The cool breeze had the color in his face up and his hair a wild mess. “Do you want to have a real… debate or whatever this is, or do you just want to out-liberal arts me.” 

“I want to be friends again,” Webster said, before he even knew what he was saying. “Can we just be friends again?”

Liebgott looked like he wanted to say something like, we were friends? Instead he said, “Yeah. Sure.”

“We can let bygones just be — “

“Bygones. Sure. Like it never happened. That’s fine with me. If it’s fine with you.”

“It’s fine with me. Shake on it?”

He put his hand out and Liebgott put his hand in it. He had a strong grip from climbing and calluses at his palms and inner knuckles. They did not shake so much as clasp their hands together and Webster watched the sharp freckly bridge of Liebgott’s nose, thinking they had to seal this with something to make it real, until Liebgott looked up and their eyes met.

All the noise in the world turned into a distant hum. Oh, god, it was happening again and they were powerless to stop it. This great wave came and washed them under together. Their handshake came undone and they reached for one another desperately as though they had not seen each other for hundreds of years. This time they were sober and alone together rocketing through the darkness. His eyes closed, their lips met, he took a shocked breath through his nose and Liebgott swallowed it. 

The train went ever onward cutting a seam of light and sound into the living night. 

\---

\--

-

\--

\---

ii.

They weren’t in the emergency room longer than ten minutes before Gene came running in helter-skelter with his stethoscope bouncing around his neck. Joe bit his lip to keep from laughing, but he also ducked his head and stared at his own wildly bouncing knee as Gene skidded to a halt on the tile floor and bodily strained to keep himself from breaking hundreds of doctorly codes at the sight of Babe sitting there looking quite pathetic with Joe’s extra shirt wrapped loosely around his broken arm, which the bone had split through.

Gene whirled on him. Joe withered but refused to cower. His heart started pumping all those fight chemicals. The great thundercloud in Gene’s face swelled on the horizon but then he just said, “I’ll deal with you later.”

Babe had struggled to his feet. “It’s not his fault, Gene,” he said weakly.

Gene arranged Babe’s good arm over his shoulder. He passed Joe another soul-evaporating glance and they disappeared toward the back.

When they were gone Joe looked out the window at the ambulances shifting around in the carport and took a few deep grounding breaths as he had been instructed in an anger management class he had been forcibly enrolled in after some incidents in high school. Then he licked his thumb and tried to rub the spot of Babe’s blood off his knee, where it had dried like a bright dust in the pale hairs. He took out his phone and stared at the messages for a few moments. Buck and Bill had responded to the text from an hour or so previous — _SOS Heff broke his arm. We off to St. Luke’s_ — and he found he couldn’t quite bear to open up the thread and see what they had said. He put his phone back in his pocket and watched the afternoon heat rising off the asphalt outside the window for what seemed like thirty seconds but was probably several minutes or even a half an hour, and he woke up, it felt like, from this strange dream, when Gene said his name a couple times and finally touched his shoulder. He had cooled down a little and taken off some of the intimidating medical gear and now he just looked like a therapist, which was even worse. “You alright?” 

“Fine,” Joe said. Then everything just came out basically all at once. “I swear — actually, I just got these new crash pads, he just, well I told him to be careful on the dyno, but — ”

He tried to imitate the sound of the bone breaking; it was impossible to quite get the precise horribleness, which he doubted he would ever really forget, even as the rest of the events of the morning were already kind of a hot stressed blur. 

“Well, your first aid isn’t half bad.”

“Really?” 

“Yeah, Babe said you stopped the bleeding, and the dressing wasn’t bad, assuming that was a clean shirt. But we do a refresher course once a month, and probably this should be a sign to you that you should really be certified, both of you, if you’re going to climb in the backcountry — ” 

“Gene…” Joe put his head in his hands. “Not now, okay?”

Gene put a hand on his back. It was different to see him like this — being like a doctor, instead of just a friend — but this was the same, that feeling of his cool hand magically sucking all the poison out. “You want to wait around and take him home?” he asked gently. “Probably another hour or so. Need to set it and do the sutures before we wrap it. But if you’ve got somewhere to be I can have the triage nurse call Buck.” 

“Don’t take this the wrong way,” said Joe, “but I can’t stand hospitals.”

“Yeah, well, you really have to be a special kind of sick to like them.”

\--

He was going to go home, and he did for about thirty minutes, just to park his car and unload the climbing gear and spray down the crash pads and scrub the bloody one with bleach, more cleaning than he ever really did outside of the lab, and then he went to the bar, only to find that fucking Webster was there, looking, at the sight of Joe, like he had bitten into a lemon. They hadn’t really talked much since the night on the train. Their ride had gotten bumped off at the intermodal lot in Glendale, and they had crept together out of the yard to the Carls Jr. on Camelback, sat on the curb, lips bruised, a hand’s breadth apart, clutching malted milkshakes, called an outrageously priced Uber back to the university campus in Tempe and from there went their separate ways into the darkness. All in all it was one of the better dates Joe had ever been on, even though it was decidedly not a date; it was a kind of test or otherwise a mission culminating in a blistering makeout, near arrest, and malted milkshakes, and Webster hadn't called him or texted or anything after the fact. 

“What are you doing here?” said Webster in the bar. “Wait, is that blood?” 

“What?” Joe looked down at himself. It must have been from hosing off the pads, but it was splattered over him like paint. “Oh. Yeah.”

“Oh my god. Lieb, is that _your_ blood?”

The bartender came over. “Tequila and Tecate,” Joe said.

“I said is that your blood!”

“What? No.”

Webster was pale. His big blue eyes were big and blue. “Whose is it?”

“Babe’s. We were out at Queen Creek.”

“Babe’s? Is he — ”

“Yeah. He’s at the hospital with Gene. I saw — ” He looked down at the insides of his forearms — there was a spatter of blood here too — and showed where Babe’s bone had come shooting out. “I guess it was his radius bone.”

The bartender brought the shot and the beer and Joe downed both of them, one quite quickly after the other, without really tasting either.

Webster stood and leaned against the bar at Joe’s left shoulder. “Are you okay?”

“What?”

“I said are you okay?”

“I heard you, fuck, of course I’m okay.”

“I think maybe you might be in shock,” Webster said evenly. 

“You can’t get shock just from… seeing something. Seeing a lot of blood, you think I haven’t seen a lot of blood?”

Webster grimaced. “Yeah,” he said. “I think you haven’t.”

“Have you?”

“No! Come on. It’s not a competition.” 

The world picked up, took one big spin, and settled again, shakily, like a little boat on a heaving sea. 

“Let me walk you home,” said Webster. 

“I just fucking got here!” 

Webster drowned him out by embarrassingly yelling for the bartender like the douchebag New Yorker he was, putting Joe’s shot and beer on his tab, and closing out with a flourish of his parents’ AmEx. 

“I can get there by myself,” Joe told him when he was tucking the credit card back in his fancy wallet. 

“Sure you can,” said Webster. 

They went out the door together into the bright day. It was only March, and already it was too hot to seethe. The city did all your seething for you. In other places, in the Northeast for instance, having only been there a few times for fieldwork and conferences, the humidity in the summer made your skin feel too tight and put everybody on edge. It was like the heat reached inside you and turned up the anxiety crank a few notches with a wrench. In Southern California, where he had family he didn’t speak to anymore, they lived at the mercy of those strange winds. In the Valley of the Sun, it was so hot that the heat didn’t even make you want to do anything. The heat did all the doing for itself. 

“Did you get the send?” Webster asked him, while they waited at the corner of the block for the light to change. 

“Yeah. V7.” Joe took a breath. His chest was tight, for some reason. “My third V7.” 

“Nice.” 

He had been newly alive, or so it felt, with relief and glee, complete possessing happiness, for about fifteen minutes, until Babe tried the same problem, ate shit, and came up holding a fountain of blood that had recently been attached to his body. By some miracle, everything from the first aid class Joe had had to take back in the day at that “wilderness therapy” camp in the Plumas National Forest had come rushing back into his brain, as through a burst dam. 

“You want to come with us one of these days?”

“For the love of god. No fucking way!” 

“Come on, Web.” 

“Jesus. Maybe if you asked without blood all over you.” 

“Okay. Duly noted.” 

Everybody lived in a kind of fan around the campus, between the university and the industrial parks surrounding it on all sides, in run-down condo complexes, low and dark ranch houses, squats, bungalows. They all lived close enough that you could bike between their houses, but Joe never had anybody over his place. It was a low ranch, it could have been cookie cut from Bill and Buck’s. He lived there alone, most of the time; technically he had a roommate who sent rent every month but lived at his girlfriend’s, and sometimes he would let people squat. Usually alone. He enjoyed being alone.

At camp in the Plumas, where he had spent the better part of two years (eternity, to a teenager) in the woods under the guise of learning to be deliberate and responsible and process emotions in a deliberate and responsible way, they had run all these kinds of drills and theoreticals, like building a shelter alone with foraged materials and a single tarp. They had watched in silence in the morning elk go moving through the camp and bizarre species of birds calling in the trees. Once he had stopped in his tracks on impulse at the sound of a twig breaking on the trail ahead, and it had been a mama bear and three cubs. Animals would not let you see where they lived. That was just the smart thing to do. They were very protective of their space. He was the same — you learned quick when you were surrounded by fellow juvenile delinquents — and yet here he was bringing none other than David Webster back to his house. 

He realized something that shocked him. “How do you know where I live?” 

“Jesus, I don’t. I’m following you. Why are you always — ” 

He trailed off. Joe was forced to resort to the square breathing tactic — in four, hold four, out four, hold four — to keep from exploding and also because reality had taken on a kind of non-Euclidian slant. 

“Nevermind,” Webster finished. 

“No, I insist.” 

“You always assume the worst.” 

“That is absolutely not true and besides the worst tends to happen, like a lot.” 

“What's the worst that can happen if I know where you live? I’m going to toilet paper your house in the middle of the night?” This was comically frustrating. He was going after a doctorate in English Literature and didn’t understand symbolism? Joe shook his head in disbelief. But then Webster said, “Do you want to blindfold me or something?” and it kind of sounded like he meant it. 

“Too late,” Joe said, gesturing up his driveway. There was probably blood in his truck, he realized at the sight of it. 

The crash pads were drying in the sun and there was a little reddish stain around one of them where the blood-tinged water had evaporated and blistered in the heat. Webster stared at it on their way to the back door. “Are you sure Babe's alright,” he said. 

“Gene won’t let anything happen to him.” 

“I know — but — ”

“He won't be able to climb for a while so he'll be totally insufferable,” Joe said, shoving the door open with his hip. It was cool inside and still smelled like the coffee he’d made early in the morning, and air conditioning, and the burned-rock-and-cactus smell that undergirded everything in the valley. “Come in. Take your shoes off.” 

There was a strange negotiation on the threshold. “You want me to — ”

“If you want to.” 

“I want to.” 

“Okay, fuck. Come on. You want coffee?” 

Webster literally untied his fucking boat shoes like some kind of psychopath and placed them delicately on the mat by the door with Joe’s hiking boots and climbing shoes and Chacos and conference loafers. “You should get in the shower,” he said. “I’ll make coffee.” 

“I can do it.” 

“Well I know you can, but you shouldn’t.” He was unbelievable. He literally shouldered past Joe and started going through the kitchen cabinets. “You're making this impossible,” he said. 

“What!” 

“Let me do this for you. I want to. Go get in the shower.” 

“Or what.” 

“Do you want me to leave?” 

In four, hold four, out four, hold four. Maybe later there would be time to analyze exactly why this was making him insane. 

“No,” he tried, but no sound came out. He said it again louder and maybe it sounded angry or maybe was too loud. Webster kind of startled. “I don't want you to leave,” Joe said evenly. 

“Okay, that’s a start.” 

He turned back to the cabinets. Joe leaned up against the kitchen island and tried to consciously relax his shoulders. “Coffee’s in the cupboard by the fridge,” he said. 

“Lieb, for the love of god, you’ve got to go get in the shower.” 

“Is this your way of trying to tell me that I smell bad?” 

Webster whirled on him, which was ridiculous because he had been kidding. He had been, right? “It’s my way of fucking telling you that you’re covered in blood, asshole!” 

“Jesus, Web, calm down. I am not _covered_ — ” 

“We are not having a semantic argument,” Webster said firmly. “I’m going to make coffee and you’re going to clean up.” 

“Now you're going to boss me around in my own house?” 

Webster looked heavenward for strength. “You’ve got to stop trying to fight with me,” he said. “I’m trying to help you.”

“I don’t need your help,” Joe told him. Lied? Probably! Sometimes you could lie and not even know it. 

Webster pursed his mouth. “I know you don’t,” he said, “but do you want it?” 

It would have been easier if he just didn’t ask, but, also, if he hadn’t, Joe would probably have punched him in the face. That would have been a lot easier. For some reason the whole process of being deliberate and responsible about making decisions and processing emotions tended to be much more readily applied to decisions and emotions regarding violence. Maybe this was why he tended to interpret everything violently. It was more challenging to think deliberately and responsibly about matters of the — he cringed, even thinking this — matters of the heart. It was its own kind of violence. He was basically clawing his own chest open and showing Webster all the carefully-guarded gooeyness. 

“Yes,” he said. “I do.” 

Webster stepped toward him and touched the hem of his shirt. Basically like he was reaching into a very dangerous animal’s cage. “I won’t fucking bite you,” Joe said. 

“Put your arms up.” 

He did. He closed his eyes. The fabric slipped away from him. He opened his eyes and Webster stepped between his knees and wrapped him up and kissed him. The small of his back went against the cold tile of the kitchen island. Time kind of melted and slowed. Everytime this happened, this being the third time, it felt like going under, submerging in cool water, floating away from himself. Webster was good. His mouth was hot and he tasted like his stupid top-shelf tequila and soda. Joe’s hand went to the scruff of his neck, where his well-groomed nape bristled and the skin was warm from being perpetually sunburnt. And the very broad shoulders which closed him in. Nobody could see him in here. It was warm and safe. His mind shed a layer or two of its customary vigilance, liquefying like a caterpillar in chrysalis. 

“You’re shaking,” said Webster, against his mouth. 

“Fuck off. No I’m not.” 

“Yes you are.” Webster ducked in toward him again like a hummingbird or something and kissed his lower lip. “It’s okay,” he said. “I won’t tell anybody.” 

Something thrilled at the thought that he could. He wouldn’t but he could. Maybe not an all-good thrill but nevertheless a thrill. It went through every nerve ending in his body and subsumed him again in the flood of the kiss. They stopped being two people who, at least on paper, hated each other; they stopped being two people at all. He put his raw knuckles under Webster’s blue button-up shirt, against the soft skin and coarse hair under his belly button, and Webster took a half-step back, sweeping a plane of brittle air-conditioned cold between them. 

Joe caught his breath. He touched his mouth. There was one of those very dangerous fires made of embers spreading in the rotting pine loam skipping invisibly under his skin. Webster was watching him. His lips were very pink and there was a rush of color under the collar of his shirt. The coffee pot snarled bitter liquid. 

“Nothing else is happening until you get the blood off you,” Webster said. 

This had probably been the fucking plan all along but Joe found he couldn’t be bothered to care. “I’ll be quick,” he said. 

“Not too hot,” Webster told him. “You’ll faint.” 

Joe cocked an eyebrow. “Not too cold either.” 

“No.” 

“Want to come with me?” 

Webster swallowed. He said no, but then he came in while Joe was in the shower and sat on the closed toilet seat, just waiting, and all but tackled him the second he turned the water off. He alleged to have never done this before with another man, which was kind of hilarious and unbelievable and also a crazy power trip; his touch was very gentle but he also scraped his teeth everywhere, _everywhere_ , and by the time they remembered it the coffee was cold. 

\--

“Have you ever hurt yourself climbing?” 

They were sitting in the shade under the eaves behind the house, half dressed, drinking cold coffee, eating stale tortilla chips. The sun was starting to turn gold at the west edge of the neighborhood. On the way outside Joe had checked his phone for the first time all day. There were a few more texts from Buck and Bill that he didn’t open, and his mom had texted, and so had any number of work and school and friends group texts who had heard about the accident. He had only opened the text from Babe, sent about an hour previous: _29 stitches. Going home now. So much drugs. My hero. I lieb you._

_If you’re telling me all this I can’t imagine what you must be telling Gene_ , he’d responded. 

“Not that bad,” Joe told Webster. “Shoulders, fingers and stuff…” 

“What about hopping trains?” 

“Sprained an ankle, one of the first times. And I’ve fallen trying to catch on the fly. Just wiped out.” 

“It's dangerous,” Webster said, like Joe didn't know this. 

“Lots of things worth doing are dangerous.” 

“Everything you like to do.” 

“Yeah. Everything that brings me any joy at all.” 

“Why?” 

Joe studied him. It was truly always a trip how you could really know somebody physically and then look into their eyes and realize you hardly knew anything about them at all. They had this whole vibrant interior life that would always be invisible from the outside. 

“Why do you think?” 

“I don't know,” Webster said, “you’re a mystery.” 

“You like that.” 

“Yeah. A lot, I guess.” 

“I don't know if I do. But I don't know any other way to be.” 

Webster snorted. Joe tried to quell the flicker of rage. “Yes, Lieb, you do,” he said. “Cut the bullshit.” 

“What — I — ”

“You’re doing it right now. You were just doing it. Come on, dumbass.” 

“You know what, fuck you!” 

“That’s more like it.” Webster grinned smugly from his lawn chair. “Lay it all over me. I love it.” 

\--

The following Wednesday, taco night at Buck and Bill’s place, Babe was out back of the house, sitting on the overturned canoe, watching the trains. “I’m already going crazy,” he said when he saw Joe. The cast and the sling looked huge on his little body. “I can’t climb for like six fucking months.” 

“Yeah. I’m sorry. I would probably jump off a cliff.”

Babe shrugged. “You told me to be careful with the dyno.”

“Could have been worse,” Joe said, sitting beside him. “Could have been your head.” 

There was no wood, so Babe knocked on his own skull. Then he said, “Are you alright?”

“Of course I’m alright. I didn’t fucking take a header off the crux of that highball.”

“Gene said you were kind of dissociating, at the hospital.” 

Joe didn’t even really know what this meant. “Well, it’s an honor to be worried about by the doc, but…” 

“You’re really fine?”

“Yeah. I felt a little weird. I — well, Webster came over.”

“What!”

“Yeah.” 

“And?” 

Joe shrugged and looked down at his hands. 

“You’re fucking kidding me,” said Babe. The charming insouciance about him was starting to come back into his pale face. “You bastard!” 

“Jeez, what did I do?” 

“I can’t believe _me_ breaking _my_ arm got _you_ laid!” 

“It didn’t get you laid?” 

Babe groaned long-sufferingly. “Do you think I can get it up on this quantity of painkillers?” 

Joe laughed. “Damn. Didn’t think of that.” 

“Yeah, well, I also, under the influence, as you so astutely predicted, might have delivered sort of a monologue.” 

“Really?” 

“God, of course. And he was like, I love you — he said this! — but I’m working sixteen hour days and I don’t have the physical or emotional bandwidth, which is what he always says, but he said I love you, this time.” 

“Okay, getting there.” 

Babe nodded. “Getting there.” He nudged Joe by the shoulder. “What about you and Web?” 

“What about me and — ” 

“Come on, please, cut the shit. Take pity on me and let me live vicariously through you.” 

Joe could feel the color in his ears. “I dunno,” he said. “It was nice.” 

“Ah,” said Babe. “You didn’t hate it.” 

“I didn’t hate it.” 

“Wow. I’m so happy for you.” 

If he was a different kind of person, he might have told Babe, I’m pretty sure the predominant emotion that I feel is fear. If it’s something else, I don’t even want to know! Whatever this was, it was a similar warm chill that went all the way through you, standing all your hair on end and making you suddenly very aware of your physical person and the space around it. He felt very attuned to every sound, uniquely alive, possessed by vigilance, and the bite mark on his hip stung when he pressed on it, which he could not quite manage to stop doing, though he’d tried. 

Instead he said, “Babe, can I tell you something?” 

“Literally anything, ever, you know that, Lieb.” 

He watched the trains moving beyond the yard and gathered this thoughts deliberately. This was where, long ago, before everything, he wouldn’t have said anything at all, because he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know that he was sorry, and because he would have already been hitchhiking or freighthopping or sneaking onto the Greyhound or walking, just walking, somewhere else, anywhere else. 

“I want to tell you that I’m very sorry this happened to you,” he told Babe, “and I want you to know that I really appreciate you as a friend.” 

Babe studied him for a while and finally Joe managed to drag his gaze from the trains. Babe’s eyes were a little bright, but maybe that was all the drugs he was on. “You big softie,” he said. 

“Aww, fuck you.” 

Babe reached across his bad arm with the good one and shoved Joe by the shoulder, laughing. Eventually Joe got up to fish beers out of the cooler, and they were still sitting on the canoe laughing together when everybody else showed up.

\---

\--

-

**Author's Note:**

> this is my attempt to write a story based on [this youtube comment](https://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/612979071870222336/social-distancing-challenge-who-can-write-the). if you would like to write one too, please tag me in it on tumblr! 
> 
> this story is brought to you by not being able to climb during coronavirus lockdown and subsequently going insane. it is named after [the tune by harry nilsson](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfjNpgZ4C5Q). many inspirations too numerous to count but i must extend a wholehearted thank you to the science boys who made me feel very at home when i visited arizona last year, and to [all the freight hopping videos i have watched in recent weeks](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2YWBYQWHCE).


End file.
